Syd Blue
As a commercial, instrument, multiengine rated pilot, Syd Blue has about 5,000 flight hours, mostly as Pilot in Command, and loves incorporating her flying adventures across the Southwestern U.S. into her writing.
Syd was inspired to write at nine years old after an author visited her school. She spent the next decades learning how to write, even convincing a high school teacher that she should spend the Teacher’s Aide period writing in the computer lab rather than on schoolwork. She studied writing in college and extension classes at UCLA. Once she learned it required much more ‘craft’ than simply typing at a laptop fueled by Starbucks, she began the biggest lesson of her life—writing is a journey within to uncover commonalities of the human experience we share outwardly. What irony! Delving deeper into developing characters requires such introspection. The result for Syd has been a lifelong classroom of who we are, and why. She discovered more about herself in the process of bleeding a vein onto a page than any other experience and can’t imagine a more meaningful journey than being a writer.
Syd is passionate about helping girls find aviation because of the ways in which the journey of learning to fly empowered her. As a magazine, book publisher and news service editor, she saw how self-esteem helped others advance their careers. Severely lacking in that department, Syd heard that flying changes you and she decided to try. It’s a great paradox that you have to have confidence to even try flying, yet learning to fly gives you confidence. She found she loved flying so much that she wanted to share it with other girls who might need that boost to help them take off. She is most proud of reviews of her novel, FlyGirl, that say reading it made them want to learn to fly.
Syd wrote both FlyGirl and Circle partly because kids wrote to her after watching her YouTube videos of women pilot interviews, saying things like: “I want to fly so bad but my parents tell me I’m too dumb. Tell me what to do.” She wanted to show them that ‘FlyGirl’ Jill has many obstacles in her life but overcomes them all to fly. She even makes it harder on herself by making major mistakes. Syd wanted kids to know they could overcome challenges to reach a goal. It sounds simple, but she found, when speaking at schools, many kids don’t have a lot of coping skills. Those can be learned, though!
Whether it’s grade, middle, or high school, the number one question kids ask Syd about flying is: “Is it hard?” She tells them not to just do ‘easy’ things—doing something hard, like flying, teaches us to be stronger than we were before. When you climb into a cockpit alone and launch into the sky, you learn to rely on yourself, because you’re the only one that can get you back down safely on the ground. Now, more than ever, our youth need to be inspired and empowered to counterbalance all the negative messages they are bombarded with daily.
When Syd became a commercial pilot, she took over an aerial surveillance company and grew it five-fold—a crazy busy time. Once she hired other pilots, she was able to return to her first love of writing and being a wordsmith. Her two novels—FlyGirl and Circle—are read in middle schools and reached the top 1% of Amazon books. Both are in the development process to become movies. You can read more about that, and her journey, at SydBlue.com.
As FlyGirl says, “Girl pilots rule!”
Website and blogs at SydBlue.com
Facebook: @FlyGirlSydBlue
Twitter: @SydBlue
Instagram: @FlyGirlSydBlue
Buy the Book: FlyGirl